Throughout the history of man's intellectual development and the expansion of his understanding of the world around him, there has been a gradual unification of seemingly disjointed areas of knowledge: art and religion, biology and psychology, etc. Mathematics and philosophy are two fields of knowledge that have also developed through such a symbiotic relationship; many historically renowned mathematicians, such as René Descartes, are also known for advancing their own philosophical ideas, such as Descartes' famous dictum, Cogito ergo sum. However, overall, it is not very common for a concept or idea in one field to give rise to another idea or concept in another field, especially in the case of mathematics and philosophy, since he field is the basis of virtually all human scientific work. progress, while the other is the cornerstone of practically all of man's spiritual development. This is not to say that such events do not exist in these two areas. In fact, one of the most important developments in the entire history of mathematics has its roots in the teachings of one of the most influential religions in the world today. The invention of the number zero and the subsequent development of a written representation of the number zero, considered by many scholars to be one of the most influential and important developments in mathematics, had its beginnings in the philosophies of various religious figures of India. civilization more than two thousand years ago. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Although the identity of the true inventors of the number zero is hotly disputed by researchers today, most researchers agree that the number zero and the circular symbol that represents this number originated in l India around the 9th century. However, there is good reason to believe that the concept of the number zero, if not the symbol for zero, was already in common use among Indian mathematicians at least a century earlier, according to the sources consulted; in fact, some scholars refer to a manuscript dating from approximately the second century BCE that uses the number zero in calculating the number of arrangements of two different elements in an unknown number of locations (Datta 75). Whatever the exact date of the origin of zero, it can be said that until the Indian number system, along with its symbol for zero, was imported to Baghdad in the mid-9th century, Indian mathematicians were on their own in the world. they have developed an increasing number of methods for various calculations and applications using the number zero in one way or another. In fact, all known Hindu treatises on arithmetic and algebra contained a section devoted entirely to basic mathematical operations involving the number zero (Datta 80). Earlier manuscripts show zero being used to represent placeholders in numbers such as a million, while later manuscripts show zero being seen as a real number, like one and two, that could be manipulated and used in calculations instead of using zero as a simple number. reserved space. Some eighth-century manuscripts even used the symbol zero to represent unknown quantities in equations, just as mathematicians today use x, y, and z to represent unknown quantities in equations. But why India? Why did the Indus Valley Civilization have a symbol and concrete understanding ofconcept of zero, when no other civilization until the 9th century had zero? To begin to walk the path to answering this question, we must examine the etymology of the word "zero." The word "zero", as well as its rather archaic synonym "digit", both come from the Arabic sifr, meaning "vacant"; this Arabic word, in turn, comes from the Sanskrit word sunya, meaning “vacant” or “empty” (Karpinski 152). Surely, the concept behind the word "nothing" predates even the Indus Valley Civilization. However, even though previous civilizations understood that there was such a concept as nothing, no civilization seemed to deem it important enough to actually consider the concept of nothing as an integral part of the reality in which they lived; otherwise, Greek civilization, whose mathematical contributions such as the Pythagorean theorem and the many theorems of pre-college geometry are well known even to casual mathematics enthusiasts, might have realized that its mathematical calculations could have benefited from a concept such as the number zero. The reason why Indian civilization was the first civilization to develop widespread application of the concept of zero in mathematics and science can be found in the religious aspect of Indian civilization. More specifically, the concept of nothing and its importance are found in the teachings of Mahayana Buddhism during the second century, and in Buddhism in general, whose presence in India was felt as early as the sixth century BCE. Classical Buddhism, that is, Buddhism derived primarily from the teachings of Siddartha Gautama, has as one of its central tenets the idea of ​​sunyata, which literally means "emptiness". Sunyata is emptiness in the sense that every event in the universe is merely relative and not absolute, and no event possesses any self-subsistence (Smart 95). Nagarjuna, arguably one of the most famous Indian Mahayana Buddhist philosophers, took the idea of ​​sunyata a step further and taught in his philosophical writings, written in the second century, that all things are "empty" in the sense where nothing has its own nature in itself. (Smart 110). Nagarjuna also extended this "philosophy of emptiness" further than "classical" Buddhism by naming the Ultimate or otherwise indescribable Truth beyond Reality which is perceived by those who have not yet achieved nirvana as the Sunya, which is the Sanskrit word for void. We therefore see that Indian civilization was at the time the only great civilization to have the idea of ​​“nothing” incorporated into its own spiritual or religious aspect; it would therefore be logical that Indian civilization would be the first to fully develop the concept of zero and apply this concept to the progress of mathematics, science and the expansion of scientific knowledge in general. Another interesting reason why the Indus Valley Civilization should be the logical choice for the origin of zero, in retrospect, is the fact that no other civilization at the time used gigantic numbers in the way that did Indian civilization. Although most religions of this era, as well as those of past civilizations, were polytheistic, none had as many divine and semi-divine entities as the Hindu faith. Traditionally, there are 330 million gods worshiped by Hindus throughout India (Smart 40). Furthermore, in many works of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist literature, numbers well over a million are commonplace. For example, in the Ramayana, a spy tells his sovereign king the exact number of troops that make up his rival's army; the number of men in."